


And All the Bloody Instruments of Destruction

by cookingwithcyanide



Category: Don't Starve (Video Game)
Genre: Blood As Lube, Cognitive Dissonance, Dubious Aftercare, Intrusive Thoughts, M/M, Masochism, Rough Sex, Unsafe Sex, Unsafe insane and dubiously consensual, a batshit wilson is a happy wilson, but they put it through its paces, either of you, give it up for RACK practitioners, helas maxwell 'sanity regen' carter is too preoccupied to discern the particulars, is a wilson with blood in his hair, long live the King - Theyre not finished with you yet, mutually beneficial mutually assured destruction, not effective lube mind you, tangentially at the very least, they are Aware of the Risks for sure, wilson is probably fairly insane through most of this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-17 10:07:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29591178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cookingwithcyanide/pseuds/cookingwithcyanide
Summary: "He wants nothing more than to give Wilson everything he demands. He wants nothing less than to allow Them another inch of influence over his thoughts and actions. Both wind around his mind, saccharine and seductive. If he succeeds one he fails the other. It’s a rigged game."They still have Their hooks in Their old pieces. I think sex and violence could become very strange in the Constant, where injury can be erased with the practical application of fungus, every season brings new barbarity, and death is a grain of sand waiting for the hourglass to flip.
Relationships: Maxwell/Wilson (Don't Starve)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 34





	And All the Bloody Instruments of Destruction

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from William Aggeler's 1954 translation of 'Destruction' by Charles Baudelaire (fittingly from a collection titled Fleurs du Mal). 
> 
> "The Demon is always moving about at my side;  
> He floats about me like an impalpable air;  
> I swallow him, I feel him burn my lungs  
> And fill them with an eternal, sinful desire.
> 
> Sometimes, knowing my deep love for Art, he assumes  
> The form of a most seductive woman,  
> And, with pretexts specious and hypocritical,  
> Accustoms my lips to infamous philtres.
> 
> He leads me thus, far from the sight of God,  
> Panting and broken with fatigue, into the midst  
> Of the plains of Ennui, endless and deserted,
> 
> And thrusts before my eyes full of bewilderment,  
> Dirty filthy garments and open, gaping wounds,  
> And all the bloody instruments of Destruction!"

It’s always Wilson who invites him to come to bed. Wilson pulls him on top of himself, Wilson whispers violent fantasies and endearments in his ear and follows them with teeth. It surprised him at first, what Wilson asks him for, but he makes it worth his while to oblige him. Even as they clash in all else, they work symbiotically in this: for every blow there is a body, for every old wound there is a knife to twist.

Wilson reacts beautifully to every rougher touch. Maxwell delights to see it. Wilson snarls and writhes below him, claws his chest and back and shoulders in fiery streaks.  _ Harder, harder, harder, _ until Maxwell’s muscles burn and his joints ache, but he’ll do it, do anything to give Wilson what he’s looking for if he keeps clenching on him just like that.

He pulls a sweaty fistful of Wilson’s soft hair in time with a particularly harsh thrust and Wilson’s scrabbling nails pierce skin in eight lovely red lines that his back arches away from, arches him hard back into Wilson, and he’s cumming in mind-numbing ecstasy all at once.

It’s the best sex he’s had in… probably ever. It’s difficult to recall anything from before the Throne and the Constant, before he was swept up and bundled away by  _ Their _ enchantment, but by the marker of how long it takes for him to feel his legs again after orgasming inside Wilson, it’s pretty fantastic. He comes down shaky, heaving, and dizzy for hours every time. He’s tender and bruised for days after the fact, but Wilson purrs over him while applying salve to the marks he left that that’s what makes it  _ good. _ In the height of eroticism, the few scratches and bite marks he collects have nothing on what Wilson coaxes Maxwell to leave on him.

He doesn’t necessarily like to be rough. He doesn’t want to hurt Wilson. But Wilson demands to be hurt, Wilson fucks like a feral thing and demands blood in return.

“You know, it doesn’t always have to be so… belligerent,” Maxwell had told him after their first few liaisons, while he watched battered skin redden in blotches all over Wilson’s back and thighs.

Wilson smiled with blood in his teeth, blood that may have belonged to either of them. “Where’s the fun in anything else?” He stretched himself out like a cat and turned over to straddle Maxwell’s trembling thighs, coming in close and dangerous to nibble one of the many bruises blossoming down his throat. “Besides, you’ve always been so innovative in making me suffer. Now you can hurt me in all the  _ best _ ways. ‘S why I like you so much, you know how to apply your talents.”

Maxwell has a talent for charismatic speech and persuasion. A knack for sleight of hand and misdirection. He’s a pretty good cook, in a pinch. He might consider hurting Wilson a talent…It’s more a skill, honed through lifetimes of rigorous practice.  _ They _ were excellent coaches, and under  _ Their _ patronage he learned the variety and extent to which Wilson can bend before he fractures, breaks, and shatters. Often in a gruesomely literal sense. 

He’s sick and tired of  _ Their _ games now. It’s no small miracle - no small grace - that lets Wilson tolerate living with him, working with him. He’s… He’ll admit that he’s an obstinate ass to work with, and inept at survival, and just as melodramatic as Wilson can get while they bicker the whole day long - but it’s not as though he’s not grateful for their temporary partnership. It’ll make things easier in the long run, and Wilson isn’t exactly bad company once they finally catch ten minutes where they’re not at each other's throats over some inconsequential detail.

So he’s got a bad attitude and is very good at hurting someone who he has very little rational desire to hurt anymore. Except for that first evening when Wilson had slid in next to him by the fire, all smooth words and  _ very _ friendly hands, making tempting offers. He’d ended up following Wilson to his tent for the night, ended up thrusting into Wilson just slicked enough to fit after two fingers, ended up with the greyish imprints of Wilson’s molars on his shoulders (Christ, did he unhinge his jaw just to bite him?), ended up shoving Wilson back against the ground and drinking up his laugh; elated, breathy, violent thing as he rocked his hips up to tell Maxwell to get on with it.

He’d always known that Wilson could take a frankly impressive amount of punishment, but he’s thrown off his footing that he’s so intent to drag it out. He soaks in as much as Maxwell can give him and walks - or, more often, limps - out of each encounter reinvigorated and in exceptional humor. He thrives on the extremities of the human experience. 

“We live in endless cycles of survivalist drudgery,” Wilson tempts him away from their project blueprints when they begin swimming before his eyes, convinces him to strip as though entranced. “But you never fail to excite me in bed. You feed me unique intensities, keep me engaged. Do you want me to go mad from boredom? All work and no play…”

_ Don’t you love to entertain? Dazzle him. You love playing games. Cat and mouse on the chessboard, chasing kings, bloodthirsty. Aren’t you thirsty? He’ll bleed for you. He’ll make you bleed. _

Is it that he doesn’t enjoy hurting Wilson or that he doesn’t like that Wilson dishes out even half so much as he can take?

No, pleasure and pain twine into one at the very best of times, he of all people knows that by now. He feels the burnt, bruising brutality of Wilson in bed like the crack of thunder shuddering through him, lightning that travels along each and every nerve. It feels good. When it’s worse, it feels better. Why can’t he stand to hurt Wilson?

Because he’s nice. He’s unreasonably kind, stupidly generous, putting food in Maxwell’s hands and shelter over his head on the tenuous grounds of a mutually beneficial truce. But Wilson asks. Wilson begs him, exhorts him, demands and drags from him what he wants by force. Never anything that Maxwell doesn’t take pride and pleasure in doing to him. Never anything that doesn’t make his stomach turn.

_ Why is it so bad to give him what he needs? You love it. It’s mutually beneficial. He asks so nicely, it feels so g o o d. _

Because on the Throne the easiest, the only way to handle  _ Them _ was to sink to a place beneath himself and absorb  _ Their _ every cruel instruction, enact  _ Their _ every putrid whim and be kept tolerably instead of tearing himself apart fighting against the tantalizing pull of  _ Their _ words and his own wants, dumbfounded and afraid where those ideas lined up, or came to over time, until his thoughts and  _ Their _ thoughts were one and the same, and whether he produced them himself or just accepted the vicious desires into his psyche didn’t matter anymore.

_ They _ still cling to him like wisps of smoke, almost tangible in his moments of uncertainty.

_ Fuck him so hard you break his spine. He’ll probably get off on it. Choke him until his eyes go dim, make his last act spilling semen over his own stomach. Tear out his hair crush his ribs gouge out those pretty eyes break his legs so all he can do is lay face down and take it. _

He wants to. Oh, he wants to do it all. What’s worse, he thinks Wilson might even tell him to eventually, and where will he be then? He’ll obey in a heartbeat. He’ll tear out Wilson’s heart.

The more he acquiesces, the more encompassing his own pleasure becomes, the louder  _ They _ get. The more enticing  _ Their _ words seem. He’s not always sure in the heat of the moment which thoughts are his, where  _ Their _ infiltrating influence begins, and what seeps deep into his open, heated consciousness of Wilson’s snarled, pleading demands.

It might be easier if Wilson didn’t look so pretty as a beaten mess, battered and arching on furs stretched over the cold ground, telling Maxwell in no uncertain terms where to strike next. His porcelain skin bruises in black and blooming violets. Blood drips down his face, his neck, adorns his teeth just barely too sharp for comfort like garnets, his broken nose a fount that leaches mottled green, yellow, lilac in pools around his dark eyes. Salves can only do so much to heal such deep contusions. Their shadows -  _ Their _ shadows - darken Wilson’s skin for days; he’s caught Wilson frowning over some part of the portal not coming together, kneading the murky swamp of damage on his throat where he’d told Maxwell to choke him,  _ harder, _ pensive with the heel of his hand. He takes violence, he luxuriates in it, and he wears his ill-begotten trophies like treasures until they fade and he wraps himself sweetly over Maxwell until he offers more. 

_Use your nails,_ _They_ suggest. He obliges and claws bright, sluggishly bleeding streaks down Wilson’s chest. The man yelps. His flushed cock twitches another spurt of precum onto his stomach.

“Good, Maxwell, so good, give me more,” Wilson insists in moans, bucking distractingly back onto Maxwell’s hardness inside him.

_ Good, good, more now. So good. More now. Give us more now, They _ encourage.  _ Tear him apart. Make him bleed. _

He wants nothing more than to give Wilson everything he demands. He wants nothing less than to allow  _ Them _ another inch of influence over his thoughts and actions. Both wind around his mind, saccharine and seductive. If he succeeds one he fails the other. It’s a rigged game.

Every time, he submits to his own desire - or Wilson’s, or  _ Theirs, _ all means to the same end, all roads leading him back to an overwhelming, quaking orgasm Wilson stretches out of him until he feels like his chest is collapsing in exchange for all the blood he’s drawn, tactile and appreciative in the aftermath of his own bone-deep satisfaction. Every time, he succumbs a little more easily. Fighting, resisting, declining to consent; none of it matters in the end, because the game is rigged for him to lose something in every event. All of  _ Their _ games are.

* * *

Wilson keeps a chest of medical supplies and healing items in his tent because he’s the usual medic out of the two of them. These days they dip into its stores more after sex than battle. Maxwell wonders if it’s the adrenaline rush of scaling a great beast to plunge a spear through its massive eye like Odysseus that makes Wilson practically tackle him when they finally haul the salvageable parts back to the warmth of a fire, or if he’s rewired himself so effectively over hundreds of demises to accept pain as a greater pleasure that his body is keening for ever more injury which his increasing aptitude for combat denies him. To say nothing of  _ le petit mort; _ for Wilson, fantastically brutal death must be the most final and consumptive orgasm. Under  _ Their _ patronage, Maxwell learned how to serve him that, and Wilson learned to love the taste. Or maybe he just gets frisky in the Maenadic euphoria of being so thoroughly covered in the steaming blood of something he killed.

Maxwell doles out spider salves for the frostbite of the Deerclops’ attacks, blue mushrooms for the bruises sustained in landing each time the giant threw him off its hunched back, honey poultice to be applied with shaking hands to the torn tissue of his hole where Wilson had rolled Maxwell on top of him like an alligator in the snow to coyly declare, “I’m drenched already, don’t you think I’m slick enough?”

_ They _ cackled.  _ They _ adore Wilson;  _ They _ got to play with him for so little a time and  _ They _ miss their hungry, tempestuous king. Maxwell acts as an all too willing proxy for  _ Their _ vile affection.

Blood, even in such copious supply, was not nearly slick enough. Regardless, it only took a little convincing, a little brute force, for Wilson’s body to accept his quickly erect cock. When something in the scientist tore open to accommodate Maxwell, he froze in shock (in revulsion, in  _ interest) _ . Wilson cried out, strangled, as his own blood welled to mingle with the carnal putrefaction all around them. Then he gasped and released it in a high, whistling breath, wild eyes fluttering shut before widening too far again, manic, frantic, the whites showing all the way around his irises a sliver of brown all but consumed by the bottomless pits of dilated pupils. Always consuming, always consumed. The blood was already cooling on his flanks.

“Fuck me.”  _ Fuck him. _ “Fuck me, Maxwell,” he’d nearly growled.  _ Fuck him, Maxwell, feel his hot blood on your cock, isn’t it intoxicating? _ His hips jerked forward without his instruction, into the tight, gritty heat. Wilson groaned. “Stars, it’s so hot, it  _ burns, _ fuck me, ruin me.” The length of his member not engulfed in the gory cleft was whetted with blood already, the searing heat of it all steaming in the frigid air. Bile slunk up his throat.

He didn’t deny Wilson, though. He’ll never deny Wilson his cruelties, not when he requests them with such tempting entreaties. Not when  _ They _ sink  _ Their _ serrate teeth into the most sensitive parts of his mind and purr when he submits.  _ Mutually beneficial. _ Wilson gets his bliss, his indulgence, all the unique intensities he can possibly stomach to keep his whirring mind from spinning off into oblivion. Maxwell gets to finally relax, step back for once and quit incessantly beating the whispers that swirl through his skull back into sullen slumber. 

Because when he and Wilson screw, the easiest, the only way to handle  _ Them _ is to sink to a place beneath himself and absorb  _ Their _ every cruel instruction, enact  _ Their _ every putrid whim and become submerged in his own bliss instead of tearing himself apart fighting against the tantalizing pull of  _ Their _ words and his own wants, starving and dissonant where those ideas line up, and come closer to every time, until his thoughts and  _ Their _ thoughts are once again one and the same, and whether he produces them himself or just accepts the vicious desires into his psyche doesn’t matter anymore. The game is rigged anyways. All  _ Their _ games are.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure what specifically made me recall it, but while writing I couldn't stop thinking about this passage from 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream' by Harlan Ellison, which actually does bring to mind much of the Constant and Their reign over it... Hmmm.
> 
> "I gave in easily. What the hell. Mattered not at all. Ellen was grateful, though. She took me twice out of turn. Even that had ceased to matter. And she never came, so why bother? But the machine giggled every time we did it. Loud, up there, back there, all around us, he snickered. It snickered. Most of the time I thought of AM as it, without a soul; but the rest of the time I thought of it as him, in the masculine … the paternal … the patriarchal … for he is a jealous people. Him. It. God as Daddy the Deranged."
> 
> ... These two are going to have some adjustments to make when the Postern goes up. No more screaming at each other and fucking in the dirt, boys, there’s company over.


End file.
